Devil's Tor (73 page)

Then from one to the other he kept glancing in that alarm... and suddenly an impropriety of their modern clothing struck him with an acuter terror. For his instinct was that they, being so dreadfully lighted, should have been garbed, the one in those shroud-draperies of the ancient past, the other in that grim war-dress of a dateless future. … And thus his thought, contained in the vision, that had waited to be released, must now be upon the very verge of delivery. It had been concerned with Ingrid—with Saltfleet as well... with both associated. … The most weird conjoining of their qualities in another
shape
—ah God! had it been in any way different from—a marriage? ... Yet that he had known. This duplicate gleaming before his eyes, it was the mystic token of the union of these two, in another place not physical. …

Not a marriage: since under no conditions of reality could two persons become one. … But in a
child. …

That was that thought.

He turned to gaze abroad over the darkened country. Then Ingrid came up behind him, and spoke—strange a voice sounded to him again. The others could not overhear. He was unsure whether her hand was touching or only feeling towards him.

"Now you are going down, Peter?"

"Yes."

"Have you seen Her?"

"You are so wise—you can hardly need to question others."

"But answer."

"Yes, I have seen Her. Your face is gleaming like Hers. Yesterday it was so too. … Therefore you are Hers—not mine... and I am going off the hill."

The phantom brightness of Ingrid's face, in fact, was like an inset in the rest of her person that grew indefinitely darker or reflected the colours of the west. She said:

"You call me wise, but I am very ignorant if your words mean that we are never to meet again."

"It is the end."

"Then how will you live?"

"Why, I shall always have this evening to remember. I beg you not to waste your pity on me at any time."

"Will you not say why you are leaving me?"

Peter smiled fearfully.

"By your very first question, you knew I was to go. … Reason enough is there I should go! ... I saw your son—the son of your body or perhaps he was more distant in time than your son... but at least he was not mine as well. …"

Understanding that she was to be silent, he pursued:

"So should we marry, this thing would be a grave sin in you. Nor may
we
suppose that these illuminations and prefigurements are all deceits. … Accordingly the step is to be mine. I wish you not to break any word to me—because it would be a great everlasting pain to have to feel I had lost your love also. … It is implied, though; and my attitude has no sensible meaning. … Anyhow, now I am going back to the world. I beg you to write me in London. I want you to offer no commentary on the text of these events; but barely give the facts—what you are to do, what practically is to happen to you. This, I think, is my meed."

"You wish that we shall never meet again?"

"I wish we may. It will be the sweetest and ghastliest reunion of all my life. … Earnestly I shall endeavour to keep out of your sight. Now give me your hand. I dare not kiss a spirit. …"

Ingrid slowly extended her hand as if she were a woman bewitched. It seemed to Peter that this elastic soft warm thing within his grasp presented the last of his selfish delights. Retaining it, he said:

"In the matter of your strength—are you able to undertake the business waiting for you?"

"I must." But he could scarcely hear her.

"Where have
you
been, Ingrid, in this last time?"

"A long way away."

"You don't want me to stop to see it through?"

"No, you cannot. …"

His unearthly sensitiveness responded to the very secret alarms on his account contained in the inflexions of her voice, and he looked intently at her, while she took away her hand at last.

"Then already you have experienced some momentous matter too!"

"Peter, someone may die here this evening. It may be quite soon—before the appearance of the first star in this extraordinary sky."

"Not you?" he questioned sharply.

"I have no feeling of death for myself, but I feel as if there were death near."

Of smallest account seemed to him the menace: yet in the gloom his face showed grey, while his eyes, now stern, prepared to quit hers that still was palely lucent. His voice fell to quietness again.

"For all unkindnesses of mine in the past, Ingrid, I beg you to forgive me. …"

Thus they parted.

But to the two others, who courteously had been looking away while waiting, Peter said, crossing to them for the purpose:

"I am going down off the hill, gentlemen: and you will transact your business with Miss Fleming alone. Her mother, you see, is not here. She was unable to come."

Only Arsinal bowed in silence—and now a heedfulness in Peter's eye transmitted to his unheeding brain how this man's face as well was changed. Dull, thin, pinched, white and haggard to the very likeness of death, it seemed still attached to life by a sluggishness of careworn anxiety alone. He was as a stranger on the hill-top, that had these miracles for all, but they must be alive—of the future. … Then, more peculiarly, Peter glanced at the other, to perceive that he was faintly shining yet. …

Delaying no longer, he turned his back upon all three and started to walk towards the eastern homeward edge of the plateau. And for the few moments that his receding shape remained in sight, it was ennobled as a spectacle of solitude to the eyes gazing after by the mighty sky silhouetting it. Minute by minute the massing clouds, in form and colour, had grown more fantastic and savage and fearful. The earth was entering night.

Ingrid wondered why she felt so little emotion. Surely it should be sinful and detestable that she could let him go from her thus and know no impulse to recall him. But with deeper workings was her heart filled. Her mind, that was its echo and consequence, resembled a great swaying sensitive web of sombre thoughts, floating this way and that. Now immediately were all they that were left to go into bitter sacrifices. Now Peter was in safety—she could not have retained him. Suddenly she drew a long, wavering breath. Now she must prove her race, and it was time to have done with thought.

When Peter had quite disappeared, the evening of a sudden seemed to grow much darker, the inapprehensible discord of sky colours to die down in its different regions to a finer but even more disturbing intensity of sphinx-like depth, the great baneful crawling clouds to crouch closer to earth; a living tragedy now rapidly to approach, heralded by these insubstantial cyclopean portents. What stood for the human companionship of those three was all that remained to save them from a crushing sense of helplessness in the presence of fate about to strike. With that vanished fourth, somehow, was gone their last material link with the world, leaving them for want of his support cut off and exposed to the immaterial attack. In more or less distinctness was felt by them that his art should be an activity of the world, related to its other activities: therefore that he himself, notwithstanding these late experiences, had still been solid of the world.

But first one, then the other, of the men came up again to Ingrid, who awaited them quietfaced and silent. And Arsinal perceived neither in her nor in Saltfleet anything of the gleaming that Peter had perceived but too well: because it was a spiritual light, not for the conceited simplicity of the eye of the brain thinking to construct everything from surfaces. Indeed, yesterday he had seen the shining in her, and otherwise understood what it should betoken: but now his impatience prevented him; an impatience in the service of a larger anxiety that was his will and life. … Saltfleet beheld Ingrid's exaltation of flesh so dimly that he fancied himself deceived. He spoke not to it, but to her human circumstances:

"Here is very much the eleventh hour, I am afraid; and yet important changes of mind have been made so late. I am not to pain you by referring to Mr. Copping. I know, and wish to know, neither the motive for his present conduct, nor your last relations. But if you as well would rather put off the trial in front of us all to another time, we shall of course readily consider your natural feelings of a woman—remembering especially that you must just have been through another unpleasantness already. Mr. Arsinal will concur that we have certainly no wish to push matters beyond common humanity."

Arsinal made no sign.

"Thank you: but I think we must do it now," replied Ingrid, in a faint, resolute voice.

"There is an alternative proposition. It shall be done now, since you so desire; but perhaps there may be no need for you to participate actively. … Just now I saw your stone in your hand. …"

"Yes, I have it—it is in my pocket."

"Please keep it there for a minute. My proposal is that Mr. Arsinal shall do the joining... while I stand by as immediate witness, and you remove yourself to a distance—staying in sight if you like, though my counsel is that you should walk right away—"

"And can you engage that the danger to me will then be averted?"

"Unfortunately I cannot—so long as you are on the hill at all. But the risk should be less."

"You know I have not come up here to avoid a risk."

"I will be plain. You are no more than a girl, and I ask you to entrust your stone to me, and return home."

"Nor have I come here only to go home again. The meeting was arranged between us for a purpose,—and—I—am—here—for—it."

They looked at each other. Saltfleet's face had no super-natural light for her, but somehow she saw it thinner, sterner, nobler. … He said:

"What was arranged was a general meeting; whereas Mr. Copping has deserted you, and your mother has not appeared at all."

"Her staying away is to deprive you of nothing."

"We do not know that. I shall still be very plain. You are a single young woman, on a hill remote from other persons, with night coming on, in the company of two men much older than yourself, nearly entire strangers. Another accident may happen within the next minutes—the hill may again become publicly notorious. Then I should not care to pronounce whose plight will be the more unenviable, yours or ours. Decent men must conform to the prejudices of society.. , . Do consider the point, for I am not distorting the probabilities in the very least."

"You are talking of the world. We have left the world behind us, down there. This place belongs to a spirit."

"You should also reflect that a girl living at home has duties towards her people. …"

"I am grateful for your reminders, but have seen too much here this evening already to have any thought of leaving before the work is finished."

"Why is this reapplication of the stones to each other necessarily to be witnessed by you?"

"Because there is no meaning else."

She turned upon Arsinal. "Cannot you satisfy Mr. Saltfleet that my undefendedness, and obligations, and social liabilities, all vanished from the moment I set a foot on the slopes of the Tor? He must know it too—but should be so used to looking from all sides. …"

"I do indeed consider, Saltfleet, that you are rendering Miss Fleming an exceedingly bad service by this belated pressure. She feels herself called, and is called. The same courage that has brought her here to meet us will enable her to go through the passage now waiting. You deliberately ignore that a high heart may more than cancel the disabilities of Nature—as also that we are assembled in the invisible presence of laws definitely more dreadful than those dictated by the mutual fears of persons forming a society. But you yourself are here frivolously. …"

"Neither have
I
ever failed in audacity for the furtherance of my own ends."

"I will not be drawn into anger now."

"Nor will I leave Miss Fleming here alone with... a sacrificer. You want me to follow Copping, I know."

There was a pause.

"Stay, then," said Arsinal. "But to a sacrifice go knife, rope, altar, and victim, and I have none of them. I have no power to detain Miss Fleming against her will."

"You will not go down alone," Saltfleet put to Ingrid, "but will you go down with me?"

"No, I cannot."

"My insistence distresses you."

"I am distressed already. … You know how very near to me Peter Copping was. You saw how he left me so quietly. He is out of my life. Never have I honoured him so much. He could not have acted in any other way to keep my full esteem. … Well, he did not beg me to come away from this place."

Arsinal took a short step towards her.

"He was overtaken by a state of trance, during which he should have had a vision. Did he relate it to you?"

"He did not tell it all."

"Here, in this extraordinary hour, beneath this presaging sky, insolence must be far from my mind, Miss Fleming. Your statement, however, signifies that you are now free. Then doubtless Mr. Copping was shown in his vision how marriage to you would be... a great unrighteousness. …"

Moments passed before Ingrid answered him.

"Yes. … He thought we ought not to marry."

"Therefore you are dedicate."

As Peter had done, Ingrid turned to gaze over the low south country. It lay there extended, a steadily darkening dusk of insignificance and the picture of death, so shifted was all the presentness of the scene to the giant castles and cities and seas above. Those vast, torn, rounded, crowded clouds were less masses than depths: down through their chasms were other clouds, other chasms—and others again... until she wondered what that journey could be like. On fire were some of the surfaces. Surely the sky was obeying a powerful word. Its great transformations, gradual but perpetual, were no driving of a wind, but should be the slow convulsive movements of some held mythological prodigy, as broad as the heavens, towards its doom of metamorphosis. Night now approached fast. …

She replied to Arsinal:

"I am leaving it all to you: I wish only to look on. If anyone is dedicate, it will appear afterwards."